You could not be more wrong!!!!
And, the sad fact is there are many who cannot seem to acknowledge what a “small family farm” is. In New England, there are not really any large farms...even if you grow 300 Acres of pickles, you are still tiny in the scale of farming compared to the Midwest. Most New England small farms grow a little of everything and sell directly to consumers. Having said that, the actual family farmers, working for themselves, that are cultivating hectares, are functioning on such a slim margin, I seriously doubt you can fathom working so hard for pennies. The price for commodities corn is $3/bushel - that's what it was in 1980! If you are, in fact, an actual farmer, running your family farm, which you can only do if you inherited it and did not have to sell off half the property to cover inheritance taxes, you have to be pretty clever and industrious to get by.
Subsidies go to the commodities growers, and tend to be for things like NOT growing something, such as corn(field/dent corn). There are NO subsidies for farms that grow produce for fresh consumption that you might buy at a farmers’ market.
While there are some subsidies going to help buy insurance for smaller, more diversified farms, you'll see the payouts to farms with losses are meager and most of the money is spent on administration (shocking/sarc). We lost an acre of watermelon in a hurricane and got as check for $80. That was the last time we signed up for the insurance. The seed cost us over $500, so thanks for that.
The price of milk today (no, I'm not a dairy farmer, but I could play one on TV) is the same as it was in 1964. Even the LARGE company in our region is paying $12.50/CWT (that's more than 11 gallons of milk to all you sucking off the teat). Think about that for a minute. My husband's family farm is trying to pay help their $10/hour, buy health insurance, pay for supplies (which, unlike milk, have only increased in cost since 1964) AND NO, there are NO subsidies for the small family farm, dairy or otherwise. A few of the dairy farms left around us will probably be gone by the end of this year because of the drought.
At our produce farm, we came into the growing season knowing we had a total loss with the stone fruit because of the winter weather (about $100,000) and have suffered severe losses in many crops due to the drought. We will not make that money up, and we have emptied our savings to pay our labor force and other expenses. DROUGHT.
The farms have already been told there will be no actual money forthcoming, but there will be more loans. Those loans will be at a higher interest rate than our bank is offering, they will require at least 20 hours of paperwork, and they will take months of sitting around with the USDA people explaining about how the lack of water affects the growth of plants, hay, pasture...
our dairy friends are feeding out hay in August when they should be on pasture. Contemplate that expense, if you can...hay runs $7-9/bale up here...that cow eating the hay is not covering the expense of her feed with the price of milk.
OK, so that's our side of the story...
So, who's getting the money - not actual farmers. There are tons of people who own farmland and file for subsidies every year to NOT grow something. Or they have some kind of bogus conservation project.
From openthebooks.com “250 entities for $1.54 million in farm subsidies are within the Washington, D.C.
ZIP codes more than in New York City (248), but less than Chicago (930).
1,518 entities for over $8.76 million are mapped within the northern Virginia ZIP
codes serving McLean, Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax Station, etc.
1,032 entities for over $8.178 million are mapped within the beltway Maryland
ZIP codes serving communities such as Brandywine, Silver Spring, Chevy Chase,
Bethesda, etc.”
http://www.openthebooks.com/assets/1/7/Federal_Transfer_Report-_Farm_Subsidies_The_Big_Dogs_2013.pdf Also, and this will shock everyone(NOT):
“Within the geographic borders of the City of Chicago, 930 entities received an aggregated
total of $6.129 million in federal government farm subsidy payments. ...Federal farm subsidy program dollars are flowing into the “urban areas”- where there are
no farms. The recipients include grain traders and members of the Chicago Board of
Trade, wealthy second generation inheritors, and non-profit organizations such as the
Mallard Habitat Foundation and a charity of The Nation of Islam. Many entities receive
the federal subsidies at their downtown loop office buildings or residential mansions.
Nearly every neighborhood in the city receives federal farm subsidy payments- including
the Gold Coast, Downtown-Loop, Lincoln Park, and even the President’s neighbors in
Hyde Park.”
FU CHICAGO! What is that a subsidy for growing thugs not Really, check out the website, or any other about farm subsidies, your hair should stand on end. The small farm that actually grows good tomatoes and fresh sweet corn will be gone (yes, I know, except for the start up farms of minorities (insert anyone who feels like being a farmer that is not “privileged”)and they will stay in business for a few years until they realize it actually requires skill, is hard and just “didn't work out”.
Please don't ever accuse the “small farms” of sucking off the teat. What's really happening is family farms are sucking off the hind tit.
It pains me when the people who keep me sane are so completely wrong :(
//rant off//